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Stone's canniest directorial decision was to choose Cruise. The actor remakes himself in the film, trashing preconceptions, showing a range that astonishes. Ron's furious arguments with his family become primal screams of frustrated love. In the Mexican scenes, where Ron meets a prostitute who treats him gently, Cruise's tearful face expresses wonderfully conflicting feelings of joy and fear, peace and release. He makes sense of the story even when the movie doesn't. No wonder that at the end of the filming, Kovic gave | Cruise his Bronze Star. "He gave it to Tom for bravery," Stone says, "for having gone through this experience in hell as much as any person can without actually having been there." The presentation was made for the actor's 27th birthday.
Thomas Cruise Mapother IV was born on the third of July, 1962, the third child of Mary Lee and Thomas Cruise Mapother III, an electrical engineer. Cruise has three sisters: Lee Anne, 30; Cass, 26; and Marian, 28. Dad had to follow the work, and the family followed Dad; young Tommy attended a dozen schools before he was twelve. Cruise learned to adapt. "I'd assume the role of what I thought kids were, what I thought was In. Sports was one way of fitting in. But I was never Mr. All-Star Athlete. It was something that got me out, as opposed to staying home and reading a book. Which I didn't understand anyway."
Tom had dyslexia, a reading disability that bred frustration and a poor school record. "I didn't have any tools to study with," he says. "I didn't know what studying was." A grind for perfection, Cruise today often carries a dictionary so he can look up unfamiliar words. "He comes into my office," says Top Gun co-producer Don Simpson, "and goes over my stack of books, taking notes. Last night he used the word plethora. Two years ago, he didn't know the word."
In 1975 the Mapother family faced a plethora of problems. The parents divorced, and Mary Lee moved her children to Louisville. Tom missed his dad, but says, "My father was not a guy to go out and hit baseballs to me. It was my mother who took me to my first ball game." In 1984 Cruise's father died of cancer. He had never seen any of his son's films. Though there was no reconciliation, Tom's father finally acknowledged his domestic mistakes. An edge of anger creeps into Cruise's voice: "But he never said it to me."
In Louisville, Mary Lee rallied the children. As Lee Anne recalls, her mother said, "O.K., things have changed. This is the new game plan." With no child support available, Mary Lee juggled three jobs, and the children earned money too -- especially Tom, then twelve. "All of a sudden, I was the guy," he says. "I grew very protective of my family." Cruise remembers the first Christmas without his father: "There wasn't any money for presents. So we picked names out of a hat and did something special for that person. You would find a flower on your bed. Or you'd come in to find your bed made. We also wrote poems to each other telling what we did."